5 Things to Consider When Developing Your Mobile Website

Most businesses are seeing an increased amount of web traffic from mobile devices to their site as the use of smartphones increase. Business owners need to pay attention to this important fact. If your website is not optimized for mobile devices, you will lose sales – because customers equals sales. And even the existing customers you already have may move on to your competition that may already be mobile friendly.

Google searches are now taking place more on mobile devices than on desktops – and Google knows this. They are now favoring businesses that are mobile ready with a better listing in the search results. So if your site is not optimized, potential customers will not find you while searching for you. Even if they do find you and your site is not mobile friendly, you will lose business.

To sum up, your website needs to be mobile-friendly to be found by a mobile audience that is looking for you. Not sure what makes your website mobile-friendly? Consider these questions as you view your website from a mobile device:

Does your site use Flash for animated graphics and sound/music?
Do you have to “pinch and zoom” to read the text on your website?
Do you have to scroll horizontally to see the whole page?
Are links too close to each other to be easily tapped on by a finger?

If you said yes to any of the above questions, your site is not mobile-friendly.

Below are five things to consider when developing your mobile website:

1. Use a responsive website design or mobile website

The term “responsive” refers to a website that will adapt to many different types of mobile device screens. It will automatically adapt and make the screen bigger and format buttons and links to be clicked easier by a finger.
A mobile website is a separate site that is made to load up when a mobile device is detected. These can take on the same design as your desktop version or be completely different. The best thing about a mobile website is that it can look more like an app rather than a website.

2. See who is coming to your site

You or your site administrator should have this data and be looking at it on a regular basis. Find out what pages are being visited the most and more importantly see how are they being visited. When you pay attention to these details, you can prepare the content with these things in mind.

3. Pay attention to speed

Connection speeds on mobile devices are not always as fast as when you are on your desktop computer using a cable modem. Make sure not to use large image files (or a large amount of images) in the design of your mobile site.

4. Think mobile first

We tend to think first about how our website will look to visitors coming to our desktop website. But with more and more people using their smartphones to research products and services and looking for information in small portions, designing for a mobile experience first helps you to keep the mobile audience in mind. And a good mobile design will easily convert to a good desktop experience – which is something that’s not always the case when it’s the other way around.

5. Keep it small

As large as mobile screens have gotten lately, they are still much smaller than their desktop counterparts. Remember to keep the important information on the top part of the webpage. A mobile user’s attention span is only so long, so keep the content concise and to the point.

If you keep the above mentioned points in mind when having your website made mobile friendly, your mobile audience will have a much better experience using your site and staying around long enough to be a customer today, as well as into the future.